To area residents and media who think the city took too long to deal with safety concerns at a Burnaby crosswalk, the chair of the city’s public safety committee says the city is not a private corporation.
“We are a public council and a public committee operating on behalf of all citizens,” Coun. Pietro Calendino said at a committee meeting Tuesday night. “We have processes to follow, and those processes take time. The processes are put in place so that we as councillors or staff as paid employees do not favour any area of the city over any others and that we treat everybody with respect, with dignity and with no sign of favouritism to anybody.”
Calendino made the remarks in response to letters from residents living near a crosswalk at the bottom of Cariboo Hill where two pedestrians and a cyclist were hit in a matter of four days last week.
Fernanda Girotto, a 15-year-old exchange student from Brazil, was hit and killed on the crosswalk on the morning of Jan. 17.
“I am disgusted that Burnaby has ignored or done very little to rectify this problem!” wrote Keri Brummit in an email to Mayor Derek Corrigan that day. “Do our lives mean that little to our city?”
Brummit had written an earlier email to the mayor in July, warning of pedestrian safety concerns in the area.
To address the correspondence, Calendino outlined what the city has done since calls for a light at the crosswalk were received in July.
(Calls for a pedestrian light in the area, in fact, go back to 2007.)
After the July complaints, Calendino said, the public safety committee directed staff to look into the concerns about the crosswalk and into concerns raised at the same time about the intersection of Cariboo Road and Cariboo Drive 140 metres away.
A staff report in November, however, focused almost entirely on the area of Cariboo Road and Cariboo Drive and recommended speed control measures and changes to that intersection.
At the crosswalk, meanwhile, staff concluded traffic and pedestrian volumes were too low to warrant a light.
Despite the numbers, the committee directed staff to “continue reviewing the crosswalk in the area,” according to Calendino.
After Girotto’s death and the two other accidents, Mayor Corrigan told the press he wasn’t going to be reactive about changes to the crosswalk.
“I’m not in the same position that the media is to immediately react to a situation, as that we have to go through a very careful process, consideration as to what the best options are,” he told Global News.
The city’s about-face on the pedestrian light the following day, when it announced it would install one within two weeks, didn’t mean the city was bypassing its process, according to Calendino.
“The process was going on,” he told the NOW. “Staff was already working on those items, and they were going to come to us soon anyway, so the only thing we did is just advance it for a week or two.”
If staff were working on safety improvements at the crosswalk, they didn’t give Eszter Nemeth any indication to that effect last month.
A mom at the Cariboo Hill child care, Nemeth emailed the mayor and engineering department on Dec. 5, after witnessing a serious rear-ender at the crosswalk.
“It is a miracle that no fatal accident happened at that location,” she wrote. “There are townhouses on the south side of Cariboo, and I can imagine many people using that bus stop. That crosswalk is not safe; there is not even a push-button operated flashing traffic light.”
She got an emailed response from the city’s assistant director of engineering, Doug Louie, the following day.
“A recent review found that a traffic signal was not warranted due to the very low volume of pedestrians and vehicles crossing the roadway,” he wrote. “However, we will try to obtain the details of the recent crash from the RCMP to gain a better understanding of the circumstances and to determine if any changes need to be made to enhance safety.”
After Girotto’s death, Nemeth was devastated.
“I felt responsible, quite honestly, because I didn’t push more, because I thought, ‘Oh, they are the engineers; they do know; maybe I should listen,’ and that’s where I left it in December,” she said.
Louie told the NOW the file on the crosswalk had "remained open" after the complaints in July, but no decisions about the crosswalk had been made and no plans had been put in place before the three accidents last week.
“We were going to look at it in 2018 to see if there’s something that we want to recommend or change for that particular crosswalk,” Louie said.
One of the reasons the city didn’t simply reject the requested crossing light in November (as it had in 2007), according to Louie, was that the ICBC crash statistics used in the report were two years old and didn’t seem to reflect what area residents were saying.
The 2015 stats showed there had only been three crashes in the area in five years, but area residents seemed to be reporting more frequent crashes, Louie said.
Because there is a one-year lag in the data ICBC provides, he said the city didn’t get the 2016 crash statistics until December and won’t get the 2017 data until next year.
“Maybe a year later, when I get the 2017 data, it might be more obvious,” Louie said.
Louie said staff decided to tackle the concerns at Cariboo Road and Cariboo Drive first because the solution presented itself first.
Asked if staff would have focused on the crosswalk first if they had been directed to do so by the public safety committee or council, Louie said yes, but explained staff is ordinarily left to organize its own work flow.
“We thought we had time to do the crosswalk review,” he said. “Who would have guessed that a tragic fatality would happen?”
